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The transformation we seek in psychoanalysis is twofold: a transformation into language and a transformation into using language in a way which supports symbolic thinking. Symbolic thinking underpins psychoanalysis and yet we are confronted repeatedly with how fragile such thinking can be and how easily concrete thinking takes over in ways which are not always immediately evident when it is the analyst who becomes prey to it. Impasse may always have a form of concrete thinking on the part of the analyst, as well as of the patient, as its foundation.
In this chapter I suggest that the increasingly popular ‘here and now’ technique lends itself to this pitfall if it is not grounded firmly in a theoretical and technical approach resting on the form of temporality described by Freud as ‘evenly suspended attention’ (in the Strachey translation of ‘gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit’; Freud, 1912, 1923), sometimes also referred to in the literature as ‘evenly hovering attention’ or ‘free-floating attention’.
Its main characteristic is an unfocused state of mind. Such a state of mind implies a withholding of immediate response and thus a duration. While the issue of time in psychoanalysis is usually mentioned simply in relation to the fixed duration of sessions, I am here ascribing a central place to time as a function of the specific modality of the psychoanalytic interchange itself, which stems from the analyst's evenly suspended mode of attention. Paradoxically, while in the analyst it privileges a more a-temporal primary process mode of thinking, for the patient, while a-temporal modes are being fostered, it also brings to the fore issues around time that are at the
heart of psychoanalysis: to do with the toleration of frustration, the apprehension of and positioning within the Oedipal situation and the generations, the depressive position (which involves connecting different moments in time), mourning, and the capacity to conceive of a past and of a future. These issues